chat

And poor people don’t work? My brother in Christ. Work is the single most popular thing to do. We all want to work and there’s not enough jobs.

Go ask any college seniors and they’re legit worried their degrees are all going to be for nothing! They’re sending out applications like crazy and porks aren’t hiring! Not even STEM is considered good enough and it’s literally the hardest types of degrees.

Fuck off. Our unemployed have to become workhorses just to get noticed by porky and he doesn’t want to hire in the first place. Your generation got lucky. Deal with it.

Job hunting should be considered self harm

Last week, the big thing I had going on was going on a field trip with 4th graders to an Amazon Warehouse. You can read more about it at that link. I was honest with the teacher who's been running the trips (I think this is the second year the school has gone?) that the trip really felt like mostly Amazon PR/Propaganda for the kids. I said, considering how many kids thought the idea of "playing video games at work" sounded cool and said they wanted to work there, it seemed to be working.

Hi, I'm duderium, you might remember me from such recent threads as "are your bosses acting shittier lately?" and "is it ethical to write a novel inspired by Jeffrey Epstein?" Well, I got fired from my blue collar job about a week and a half ago for incompetence (after lasting for two years at that place), so currently my job is just writing novels. (My spouse has a good job so we're alright financially.) I applied to three similar kinds of jobs, got two interviews and one offer, and accepted it. I start next week and am not excited about it at all! There's a gardening job near where I live which would probably be way easier and less stressful, but the salary is lower and it's basically a dead-end job. At the last gardening job I did, I was forced to do tons of busywork (cleaning shitloads of plastic pots), which was bizarre, and my boss there was also never satisfied with my work. I've more or less accepted that life for me in the USA is going to be about either unemployment or just trying to survive at my jobs long enough to put them on my résumé. I work as an oil technician (fixing oil-fired boilers or furnaces at your house) so it's going to be interesting to see if this kind of job even exists a few weeks or months from now!

I prefer writing and teaching but no one will hire or pay me to do that, so for the moment I'm condemned to crawling around in disgusting basements while fixing machines that should have been retired and outlawed decades ago.

I think that my Epstein novel is finished for the time being. I listened to the criticism I received here on hexbear about it and did my best to address it, and also cut out eighty fucking pages over the last few days in order to appease my agent, who said that the novel was too long. Sixty pages of that huge cut was done in one day. The following day, I was so exhausted I could barely bring myself to even think about that book. I'm going to submit the third draft to him today. Hopefully he will send it to the publishers at that point, and hopefully they will publish it without forcing me to do too much editing (yeah, right, if they accept it, they're going to make me cut out a lot more ).

I also have a science fiction novel that is almost certainly going to be self-published because that's basically the only way science fiction novels written by unknowns are published these days, as far as I can tell. It's about another Earth orbiting the sun in the present day, except on this other Earth, it's the year 1492. Where did this Earth come from? Why is it there? You'll have to read the novel to find out! The story is told from the perspective of four characters: an American astronaut racing to the planet, a Muslim astronomer living in Granada, a Mayan (not Aztec) translator living in Tenochtitlan, and an American scientist living on our Earth. People don't seem to be into these kinds of novels these days, ones told from multiple perspectives I mean, but I just couldn't resist. There's a scene early in the book where the astronaut shoots Columbus in the head. The whole first draft is done except for the final section, which is for the translator. I'm not sure how to wrap up her story, but I'm very happy with how everything else has turned out. I think at this point all, or nearly all fantasy and science fiction is orientalist, so I'm doing my best to ground my stories in research and respectfully describe the cultures in them.

Getting fired sucks and is kind of an emotional rollercoaster. I hated that job but I couldn't bring myself to quit (since other jobs in this field would almost certainly either be either the same or worse), so it was only a matter of time.

Stay strong, fellow corpo-rats. And thank you for making these posts, Wizard.

Not sure how much longer these 14 hour days are sustainable. Private equity owners are panicking. They’ve spent years turning a solid profitable operation into a hollow shell of losses and talent exodus.

And now that the markets have turned, an IPO will be undervalued and nobody has the cash for a private buyout.

I think I’m going to do a month of backpacking around Japan if it all ends up going under.

It's crazy how good having two consecutive days off is. This will probably end for me next month though and I'm dreading it.

Labor is saved when the means of production are privatized. When a billionaire acquires offspring, their offspring automatically starts with a positive labor-balance which offsets the labor-savings created when their parent privatized the MoP. This offspring is thus morally in-the-clear to spend from this labor fund, and as a society, we should thank them if they ever manage to spend all of it.

I think this was in Das Kapital, but I couldn’t find the part where he says this.

/s

A lot of people at my workplace are getting frustrated and ranting at how bad it is. Certainly, whenever we have to do something taxing and repetitive for 3+ hours, those thoughts do slip into my brain.

But I'm free. I ride my bike 20 minutes to work, I am full-time with health insurance and the ability to take a surprising (for working-class American standards) amount of time off. I am getting to the point where I understand more about the store than most of the people above me. I don't expect to be able to turn that knowledge into a business plan, but I'm putting over $1000 a month in the bank, I have a finger on the pulse of what people are consooming, and this job will ride out any recession until I can pay off most of a mortgage (pending).

I do feel kinda bored and I think I want to switch departments, but it doesn't make me feel nearly as "stuck" as other jobs did. Also there's a handful of people here that I can openly talk about radical politics with.

it was fine. I have way too much to do and very little time to do it 😅 trying not to burn out